Non-violencing: Imagining Non-violence Pedagogy with Laozi and Deleuze

Abstract

This paper explores the challenges of non-violence as an educational subject. Conceptually framed by nonduality, this cross-cultural conversation between Laozian and Deleuzian viewpoints articulates reforming non-violence into non-violencing within the educational discourse. Non-violencing is a shift that opens up space to theorise non-violence as open-ended, uncertain and dynamic. Seungho Moon utilises Laozi's Taoism to examine yin–yang cosmology to illustrate the continuum of violence/non-violence. Proceeding from the notion of non-action (wuwei, 無爲), he argues that non-violence is not the opposite of violence, but it is a form of active action by not doing. Charles Tocci draws from Deleuze to connect non-violence to the concepts of haecceity, minoritarianism and multiplicities. Together, both authors postulate that non-violence is not a thing. Instead, both authors consider it in its gerund form to be a particular kind of activity performed to prevent violence in whatever relational patterns it may take. This open-ended space created by non-violence facilitates imagining a fresh approach to human interactions. In promoting this cross-cultural conversation, the William Joiner Institute Teacher Initiative Project (TIP) is highlighted as an exemplary program emphasising the uncertainty, incompleteness and paradox of the violence/non-violence duality and non-violencing pedagogy. This cross-cultural, philosophical study will provide educators with salient epistemological and pedagogical frameworks with which to advance the field of non-violence education.